Our Homeschool Curriculum (Grades 2 and 4)

Lots of people have shared their school plans for this next year in the not-back-to-school blog hop: curriculum week. In fact, I shared our preschool curriculum plans several weeks ago. Now finally, here are our basic plans for DD and LD this next year. While they work on their own levels for math and language arts, we do most of our other units together.

The list below won’t give you any idea of how our day works, but shows our general plans (subject to change–additions, child-led learning opportunities, etc.). If you are interested in seeing how I plan for the school year, I’ll include those article links at the bottom of this post.

Daily Math Work: We’re pretty happy with our basic math textbooks. DD will continue with borrowing/carrying and is moving into multiplication. LD will sharpen his double-triple digit multiplication and continue with long division etc.

Spelling: We use and love All About Spelling. It covers spelling in a progressive way. In this lesson, DD was going over the soft and hard “g” sound. It is multi-sensory. You can see DD using tiles on a magnetic board, plus the write words, phrases and sentences on paper (or the dry-erase board or in chalk) practicing the rules they have covered in that particular lesson.

Writing: We have a number of writing ebooks we got from Teacher Express. We’ll be using those a lot for creative writing, narrative writing, etc. Plus doing real-world writing (letters, thank yous, lists, etc.)

Social Studies

World Cultures (Starting with Africa and then depending on how things go perhaps moving on to the Middle East and Asia). Africa Unit: We will be covering the regions of Africa and just started North Africa last week. We’ll cover both the culture, geography and history (ancient-modern). We have an amazing basic text and lots of read alouds too. More details coming soon! Here’s a picture from the other morning. Yes, more pin maps!

American History: We’ll be doing a little bit on the early settlement to go along with a trip we have planned this fall.

Geography: Mostly Africa, though we’ll review our song the 50 States That Rhyme (all the U.S. states in alphabetical order) from time to time too.

Biographies of Famous People: This is a unit that will go on all year just covering famous people who have shaped history. We started with 100 Folk Heroes Who Shaped World History last week (I bought several of the books in this series). These are very short entries (they take under 5 minutes to read) but cover people from Helen of Troy and Homer to Jesse James and Harry Houdini. Plus, we’ll be doing a couple biographies that ties into our unit on Africa.

Simple Machines (Time Permitting–we ran out of time last year when we were studying physics)

Plus, the kids do all the activities that ED is covering in her science curriculum. LD is particularly keep to do natural disasters again; the last time we did a natural disasters unit was about three years ago!

Arts and Music

World Music Class with friends–primarily African music

LD — Trumpet, DD — Piano We took a long break from music, so we’re starting back very slowly to build confidence (and practice time).

Crafts, Art & Music Appreciation (in the biographies above)

Foreign Language

Continue with German

Others

typing

critical thinking and logic activities and games

Sports/Extras

LD: Team Gymnastics, Scouts, Children’s Choir

DD: Irish Dance, Scouts

ED: Gymnastics, Play Dates 🙂

Children’s Theater: We attend 3-5 children’s plays/musicals each year and have several lined up for this year as well.

Roller Skating: We’ll attend a two hour homeschool roller skating session about once every two or three weeks to catch up with friends.

Bike Riding: Before we moved here, LD learned to ride a bike. We live on a steep, steep hill though and so the girls have only every used bikes with training wheels. I will be taking the girls and their bikes to a local park twice a week to learn to ride bikes. We have a 1/2 hour between dropping LD off at gymnastics and when ED’s gymnastics starts so that’s my goal until the weather is too cold for bike riding!

I talked about how I assess our homeschooling philosophy: Am I happy with *how* we are homeschooling? I talked a lot about the books I’ve read that helped us find the homeschool style that works for us.

6 Responses

I love reading posts like this! I think it’s fascinating to read about what other homeschoolers are doing. My older daughter is interested in natural disasters, so I’ll be looking at that link for sure. I hope that you and the kids enjoy NOEO- I recently discovered http://buildyourlibrary.com, so we’re going to give that a try this year.

I love reading posts like this! I think it’s fascinating to read about what other homeschoolers are doing. My older daughter is interested in natural disasters, so I’ll be looking at that link for sure. I hope that you and the kids enjoy NOEO- I recently discovered http://buildyourlibrary.com, so we’re going to give that a try this year.

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Hi! I’m Liesl!

Do you believe education can be exciting, inspiring, and full of joy? We do too!
I love the quote by William Butler Yeats, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." It's about getting the kids involved, engaged, and fired up about learning (while juggling the rest of life too!)
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Earth Science Packet, 150 pgs

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Cells Unit (100+ pages)

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Simple Machines Packet – Worksheets Lapbook Activities

Civics & Government Unit

World Facts Packet

Do your kids know the 4 largest countries? Which countries have the most people? The longest river? This packet covers basic world and U.S. facts.